This invention relates generally to mechanical card configurations where the card contains a mechanism that causes a piece or portion of the card to be presented to a user upon opening. The card consists of printed matter in a variety of forms including a package that is mailable to prospective customers. More specifically, the invention relates to the packaging of such material in forms permitting their manufacture by automated methods and techniques.
A popular direct-mail marketing and fund solicitation technique is to combine in one unified package printed matter soliciting contributions or offering merchandise for sale. The manufacture of such “mailers” can be a complicated process, involving the printing of a number of separate and distinct items and the assembly of these items into a common mailable enclosure. The process is particularly burdensome when the targeted audience is large, requiring mass production of mailers in a relatively short period of time.
To date, these advertising mailers typically include a number of pages in a booklet form, with each page having an advertisement printed thereon. U.S. Pat. No. 5,803,889 to Littman purports to disclose a method for making a packet mailer that includes the steps of applying wet glue patterns to a sheet, then folding the sheet and perforating the sheet to form a packet mailer that resembles a booklet.
The present invention relates generally to a method of making a slide-out action product from a single, continuous web of material. For many years various advertising and promotional novelties incorporating sliding and slide-out members have been manufactured by various methods. To the best of the applicant's knowledge, however, none of these methods have produced a slide-out action product of the type described, fabricated from an initial single web of material. Such a method of fabricating slide-out action products is preferable in that the employment of a single roll of paper stock affords the convenient feeding of paper in one-pass through the printing and in-line finishing machinery at a high rate of speed. This allows for the production of thousands of pieces per hour, while minimizing both the time and the cost of production.